Dorothy Day

Day worked entirely within Catholic-Thomistic moral and sacramental theology; her radicalism was a recovery of Catholic substance, not a departure from it.

"I do believe in the Mystical Body of Christ." (The Long Loneliness)

The Catholic Worker is the principal twentieth-century American expression of Catholic personalism (drawing on Mounier, Maritain, and Peter Maurin's French inheritance).

"We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love." (The Long Loneliness)

Day was a Marxist in her twenties and retained a sharp anti-capitalist analysis throughout her Catholic decades; the Catholic Worker is consistently anti-capitalist without being Marxist-materialist.

"We need to overthrow not the government, but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial-capitalist system." (Catholic Worker, 1948)

The Catholic Worker prefigured Latin American liberation theology by three decades: the option for the poor, the practice of accompaniment, the sacramental presence of Christ in the poor.

"The Gospel takes away our right to discriminate. Christ is in the man on the breadline." (Catholic Worker)

Day was a converted Catholic and remained sharply distinct from the American Protestant social-gospel tradition she had encountered as a journalist.

"What was the good of writing if there was no community of believers reading it?" (The Long Loneliness)